Does anyone know what's going on at Gnome? It seems they prefer the 1% of computer illiterates above the 99% professionals who might actually use Linux. I've never heard anyone except gnome designers say anything positive about the dumbification of the UI, yet every version gets worse. Have they some research showing some kind of advantage for someone?
Yes there are a good amount of people who genuinely enjoy GNOME but what that GNOME is I don't really know. Ubuntu is heavily customized. Pop!_OS too and they are even going to release their own version of it, maybe like a fork I don't know the details. Fedora patches GNOME and their applications. When I see comments from their own developers more often than not they are using extensions, patches and tweaks outside the settings app. How many people would manage to tolerate actual vanilla GNOME I have no idea.
Their UX research is like Lucky Strike paying someone to find the health benefits of tobacco. They will ask the right questions. I remember two posts about UX testing, one a developer asked like a few random people they knew before making heavy changes. The second one looked promising from a scientific point of view and made me genuinely interested but a couple of paragraphs in and you could already see that it was full of shit.
Repo owners can do whatever they want because they can't afford to lose a single maintainer so leaders just quietly accept that and move on. Source: GNOMErs comments on reddit.
So lots of politics, not a lot of money to be made in the desktop, people are spread too thin. You don't have to deliver a good product when there's no big expectations or your job is on the line.
Is this comment too harsh? I don't know. Red Hat (right they don't own GNOME) is great and did/does so much for Linux/desktop, but many people like me who abandoned GNOME and GTK after v3 have to deal with their bullshit on a daily basis because they control a lot of unrelated stuff. So it's really hard not to be.
I've been using vanilla GNOME on debian and it's fine to me. But, I am personally not really picky when it comes to GUIs. From what I understand with Ubuntu and Pop!_OS, those distros are somewhat interested in creating their own branding, and don't seek to upstream everything that they do. I don't think there is anything that upstream can do about that, besides maybe make it easier for them to add more patches and tweaks. Some of the upstream developers I've talked to are not particularly happy that there are so many forks, but it all comes back to the manpower issue.
>have to deal with their bullshit on a daily basis because they control a lot of unrelated stuff.
Can you please elaborate what you mean here? If there are some bugs that are causing issues, you should consider reporting those.
Not interested in discussing merits and validity here but some bugs I have are US-age-of-consent-old. Some could be called features or are just UX changes or bad integration with WMs and KDE.
Well, outside my personal opinion that GTK applications became worse in UX and looks (by nature just by following their abstract HIG or peer pressure to be a "GNOME app"). The most common issue is the terrible filepicker (alien UX, no large thumbnails) that at least now you can use Portals when it's supported. Same could be said about other components like color chooser, modal dialogs, fonts that are barely readable even after KDE patches. Integration issues with Flatpak I only have with GTK applications like fonts and dbus. Some issues with Wayland, SDL, that I can't remember, maybe it was SSD, lack of window controls, abandoning system tray, I don't keep track of things that make my day worse now I just find an alternative until they come back to haunt me.
Bug fixes in GNOME are driven by volunteers, so if no one shows up to fix them after years, they are probably low priority and don't affect many people compared to the effort that it takes to fix them. Sorry, I don't know what else can be done about that, besides putting more strain on already strained open source maintainers. I don't know what you mean peer pressure to be a GNOME app. The file chooser and color chooser are unlikely to be changed unless somebody with a lot of UI/UX design experience volunteers to work on them, and makes them better in a way that benefits all GTK apps. The bugs with flatpak integration should probably be reported if they aren't already, the issue may be that some flatpak packages need to update their SDK version so they get a bug fixed version of GTK. Regarding your last sentence, issues in GNOME's wayland implementation won't affect users of other desktops.
Does that help? I don't think those are issues where you're being controlled into an unfixable situation, so I can try to help offer some solutions.
This discussion happens literally every week on reddit and other places. Same arguments and same conclusions from both "sides", not worth having it, nothing is gained.
>GNOME's wayland implementation won't affect users of other desktops.
Affects developers, and GTK itself when used. Or not if you don't think they are issues of course.
I agree, I've seen lots of open source projects get stuck and suffer from this issue where it's hard to get certain things done, it's hardly anything new, that's why I tend to focus on how to reach solutions to the problem. If you know someone who is capable of fixing these issues who needs some support, or if you have some technical insights here, let's talk about that. Otherwise, the issue is not one of being controlled -- the issue is actually because nobody has enough control to get the thing done. So let's see what we can do to give the right people a handle on the situation and empower them to do the right thing.
>Affects developers, and GTK itself when used.
I'm not sure what you mean, the developers of other wayland implementations don't have to worry about GNOME's implementation, unless they are aiming for feature parity. GTK can of course receive patches to support other implementations.
